For businesses that employ many frontline workers, the thought of leveraging tech to drive productivity may seem like an oxymoron. However, many productivity-boosting HR tools have the potential to live in every employee’s pocket using a device most people already have — a mobile phone. HR departments across many industries are in a unique position to set the tone for technology usage at their place of business.
Modeling HR tech best practices and encouraging successful company-wide adoption of new HR tools is an important component to any forward-thinking HR communication strategy. At Beekeeper, we consider the development and integration of HR tools to be a key foundation for all HR employee engagement activities. Because HR communications initiatives are incredibly important to us, we’d like to share five of our favorite HR tool hacks that could have serious ROI for your company.

Employee Engagement Tools

As businesses transition to a digital workplace, employee engagement is becoming one of the defining workplace challenges for HR departments worldwide. For frontline workforces, engagement can be especially difficult to maintain, as reports indicate that a mere 13% of frontline employees are actively engaged at work. It is estimated that in the United States alone, a staggering estimated $500 billion is lost per year due to employee disengagement. That’s why a reported 88% of businesses plan to invest in employee engagement programs in 2018. Data suggests that when a workforce is highly engaged, it positively impacts not only company culture and morale, but also the bottom line:
Given the proven value of investing in HR employee engagement activities, it is clearly worthwhile to develop a two-way digital communication channel where frontline workers can communicate instantly with management, and to each other, at any given point during their shift. HR tech like real-time messaging minimizes unnecessary pauses in productivity due to lack of answers on a particular company policy, logistics, or HR item.
Mobile messaging is also highly customizable through security and notification settings, giving team members the digital space to exchange mission-critical information. Bringing corporate and frontline team members under one digital roof also allows for employees to quickly and easily affirm each other's performance.

HR Tools for Digital Onboarding and Training Modules

In addition to ongoing HR employee engagement activities, HR tech is shown to save teams time and resources during the onboarding process as well. Using a Beekeeper integration like BambooHR, you can automatically sync new employee profiles and digitally send any necessary onboarding documents. Once new employees receive their credentials to access the Beekeeper app, your HR team can use HR chatbots to send push notifications at different junctures throughout the new team member’s first weeks and months.
This not only streamlines operations processes like signing up for benefits, but also helps the employee quickly gain literacy in company culture. Digital training modules make another great addition to any modern HR communication strategy, using chatbots to continually check in with new employees and assess their training progress.

Paperless Scheduling and Payroll

For shift workers, keeping on top of scheduling via paper notices can be both time-consuming and confusing if not kept up to date. With HR tech integrations, employees at all levels are able to easily access their schedule digitally, request paid time off, or request a shift swap among fellow teammates. Using HR tools to go paperless saves your HR team the headache of files and print-outs, as well as having to mitigate countless emails about W2 forms and other HR communication processes that can be easily automated through mobile HR tools.
HR tech is also a great way to enable paperless payroll, saving employees time from having to deposit checks manually at their bank. For employees with rigorous hours that may conflict with banking hours of operation, this can be especially helpful so as not to distract team members with bank-related errands during the work day. Beekeeper Marketplace integrations like Ultipro offer a cloud-based solution for this, helping your HR department automate payments and instantly retrieve pay stubs.

Employee Feedback Surveys

When your HR department is tasked with keeping workplace satisfaction levels high among frontline and corporate employees alike, one of the best ways to continually measure employee satisfaction levels is leveraging the employee survey chatbot to garner feedback. Beekeeper offers this HR tool to help take a quick “pulse” on company morale. By automating the process through digital HR tech, your HR team is freed up to simply analyze the responses, instead of having to process and tally the responses as well. This empowers your HR department to deploy surveys frequently, paving the way for a constant HR communication stream that will keep your organization humming along smoothly.

Schedule a demo to see how Beekeeper can boost performance and ROI through HR tech-led employee engagement activities.